The bar of red, which strikes a warm note among the cool lights and shadows of moonlight, adding immensely to the value of these tones, was suggested by the coral necklace, worn by the model from whom Leighton painted the study by moonlight for "Summer Moon" in Rome. "Egyptian Slinger" was Leighton's principal work exhibited in 1875, "The Daphnephoria" already engrossing most of his time and thought. This picture (89 × 204 inches), "a triumphal procession held every ninth year at Thebes in honour of Apollo and to commemorate a victory of the Thebans over the Aeolians of Arne" (see Proclus, "Chrestomath," p. 11), and the very fine portrait of Sir Richard Burton were exhibited in 1876. From some points of view "The Daphnephoria" is Leighton's greatest achievement. The difficulties he surmounted successfully in the work were of a character with which few English artists could cope at all. The size of the canvas alone would certainly have insisted on ten years' devotion to it from most modern artist-workmen. The extreme breadth of the arrangement of the masses, united with great beauty of line and form in the detail; the sense of the moving of a procession swinging along to the rhythmic phrases of chanted music; the brilliant light of Greece, striking on the fine surface of the marble platform along which the procession is moving and on the town below, which it has left behind, contrasting with the deep shadowed cypress grove rising as background to the figures;--all this is more than masterly: it is convincing. It is probably quite unlike what took place at Thebes every ninth year;--but Art is not Archæology. The written account of what took place fired Leighton's imagination to create a scene in which he treated the Greek function as the text; the wonderful light and the fineness of Greek atmosphere as the tone; the processional majesty and grace of movement as the action. The element of beauty which the record suggested to him was the truth of the scene to Leighton, and he has recorded the essence of it in an extraordinarily original work.